


our life is not a movie or maybe

by Randstad



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 12:33:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8401888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randstad/pseuds/Randstad
Summary: That was the thing, he’d started to realize, with Offdensen. You needed something, and one way or another, it’d just appear in front of you. As if it had always been there. He didn’t even wait for you to ask.





	

**Author's Note:**

> WHATEVER I JUST WANTED TO SNEAK IN SOME SLOW BURN CHARLES/PICKLES BEFORE NANO
> 
> will update once a week on Fridays; explicit rating is eventual, not current

They were in a bar in south Texas, south _south_ Texas, right near the border. Dusty and hot, red sunlight in the distance. The Dethbus had overheated thirty seconds into the trip, and every forty-five minutes on the clock after that, but god dammit, they’d made it. 

They’d come for moonshine, the most ass-kicking, fuck-you-up moonshine that Pickles had sworn up and down was real and would get you shitfaced in a heartbeat; he’d first drank it with some roadies and Mexicali weirdos in a dirty wood hovel back in his Snakes ‘n’ Barrels days, but now, _now_ the small garage liquor-crafting company had started to expand their operation to the only bar that would take them: one in fuck-all nowhere whose legal obligations were hazy thanks to a dubious geographic position and a niche clause of the treaty that ended the Battle of San Jacinto that, technically, left them an independent nation-state. 

(“Think of it as me treatin’ the guys,” Pickles had told Charles in his office. “It’ll be great for morale before we start recording! Just think about it!”

“We’re supposed to be in the studio at seven in the morning on Monday.” The clap of papers being pushed together and restacked. “The guest producer is very excited—”

“It’s only, like, five minutes from the studio!”

“From Austin?” Charles echoed. “Pickles, I’m not sure how to explain this to you, but, ah, Texas is quite a large state—”

Pickles swept a belligerent hand out and knocked over a brand new KLABB lamp. If Charles was happy that he didn’t go for the Schonbek, he didn’t mention it, which was a damn shame, because that was proof enough that Pickles was on his best behavior.

At this Charles gave him a long look. He restacked his papers one more time, as if the corner of one sheet had slipped out of tidy parallel and mortally offended him. 

“Fine,” he said. “But keep an eye on the time. If we’re going to make it to Austin for our studio reservation.”

“YES.”

“Pickles.” He waited until Pickles looked at him. “I’m counting on you.”

Those sentences, when Charles said them, always had this _way_ about them, where Charles could sound like both a parent and something a little too close to an actual dependent at once. Maybe he did that because it hit close to home for everybody. Pickles huffed, a kind of annoyed laugh, and left the office to chart their course for southern Texas.)

Which was how they ended up in a saloon, an actual goddamn cowboy saloon, all crowded around the bar. There were no more than eight other patrons inside—some other gang of obviously coked-out rich white guys who’d gotten bored of Tijuana and some folks who looked raggedly broke, with the harbingers of their misfortune sadly obvious; the bottles that seemed to crowd the tables by their elbows spoke for themselves. 

“I ams feel _great_ ,” Toki said, cloudy-eyed and heavy on his feet. “Pickle, your idea is so amazing! I am a new man!”

“I tell ya, there ain’t a desert where they make secret underground booze I don’t know about.”

“Hey. Hey. Look at me.” Nathan had taken an antelope skull from the saloon wall and put it on his head. “Sand viking.” He paused. “Idea for a song. Vikings. In every … every biome. A viking for all seasons. Ah, shit, I forgot my tape recorder.”

“It’s— _hic_ —it’s okay, dude, I’ll remember.” Pickles took another long draught of his bottle and then let it slam back down on the wood. “Although, probably not, actually. I can’t remember what the fuck happened the last time I drank this stuff. Three-week blackout, for real.”

There was a man who shifted out from the back storage area with a crate labeled for the moonshine—two dozen heavy bottles of it. He was assisted by a taller man, family, most likely. He set it down by the counter, and when he reared up to wipe the sweat from his brow he caught a glimpse of Pickles and abruptly froze. Pickles didn’t notice at first; he was gesturing mid-story about how Snakes ‘n’ Barrels tore up the American southwest, and how he’d written a song about fucking around in the Alamo that never got off the desert ground it was birthed in, and it was at the close of this story that the man stepped close.

He was short, stocky in his musculature, and the look on his face was hard, distant. Mutinous. “Hey,” he said. “You’re him.”

Murderface reared up proudly. “Yes, it’s me,” he said. “Murderface, the leader of—”

“Not you, asshole.” The man pointed at Pickles. “You. You’re the Snakes ‘n’ Barrels guy.”

Pickles arched an eyebrow. “Yeah, what’s it to you, dillhole?”

“This motherfucker came to our place with his band years ago,” he said. “They get shitfaced on the product, pour it everywhere, plug in their amps, one of them’s got a frayed cord, and bam! Whole place is in smoke in fifteen minutes!” He began to shrug off his jacket and roll off his sleeves to bare muscles and clenched fists; he flung his arm out backwards towards his taller cohort. “That was my brother’s garage, you dickweed!”

His voice had taken a turn for the thunderous. There was a second where silence stretched in the bar. Pickles gaped at him, utterly nonplussed. “Dude. What the fuck are you talkin’ about—”

“We were gonna sponsor Snakes ‘n’ Barrels, until you burnt down our damn factory.” Billy slammed his hands on the countertop. “It’s me, Billy, this is my booze! Billy’s Ballistic Balls-to-the-Wall Booze! Named after me, Billy Booze—”

“Very clever,” Skwisgaar could be heard muttering, “you Americans and your alls iteration that makes you think you onto some things marketing-wise—who is your brother, Ford Focus? Ha!”

“Shit, Pickles,” Murderface’s voice erupted behind him, genuinely impressed. “Burning down one garage is metal, but two garages, that’s, well, that’s _chronic_.”

There was a frisson of irritation in Pickles’ spine. “Now, just wait a fuckin’ minute, I never burned down your damn garage—”

“Bullshit you didn’t!” The man looked wildly around at the rest of the bar, the connoisseurs of his product, as if they could lend him additional support. “You guys enjoying your drinks now? Well, here’s the asshole who almost ruined it for everyone!”

“ _Two garages_ ,” Murderface repeated. “Maybe you got a condition. You ever think about that?”

It might have been Murderface’s voice as much as the subject matter, but there was something newly ugly and knotted twisting its way up the base of Pickles’ stomach, in his guts. It clouded his thoughts, dark as an oil spill, and he didn’t know why—he didn’t know this dildo or his brother, he’d drank at a million refineries, what the fuck did he care? “Shut the fuck up. Hey, douchebag, I didn’t do nothin’. You hear me? So why don’t you and your pal fuck off out of here—”

“Now you listen here—I read it on TMZ, that shit you did at your parents’ house, and you had to do it to mine too? You did it, I know you did—”

“He didn’t,” came a voice from the entryway—and fuck, how dramatic, the way the bar went oddly silent as Charles stepped through the louvered doors. Pickles almost pricked an ear for the whistle in the wind, the spaghetti western guitar. 

Billy said, “Who the fuck are you?”

“Charles Offdensen, Dethklok’s manager and chief legal counsel. Good afternoon. I believe you’re referring to the felony arson incident that occurred in Billy’s Bomb Shelter in 1988, yes?” 

Charles stepped towards the bar, one tidy Italian leather footfall after another. He didn’t extend his hand for a handshake. The saloon was eerily quiet between the three of them, now: Charles, Billy, and Billy’s gangly-ass brother. 

“Now, per my review of the incident, it looks as though there was no evidence to show that my client Pickles had anything to do with the Billy’s Bomb Shelter Burnout, so to speak. So let’s just all take a deep breath before we arrive too hastily at any—”

The taller one leapt at Charles with a wild yell, melodic broken glass accompaniment as he pulled a long, thin vodka bottle down over the counter to hold the neck out like a threat. Nathan was already on his feet, ready on his unsteady feet, the watchful guardian of his den even when shitfaced—

Charles twisted neatly to one side, grabbed him by the elbow, twisted, twisted hard, and the jagged edge of the bottle drove into the guy’s side hard, and it was downright visceral, the way Pickles could hear flesh shift under clothes when you shoved glass in it hard enough. He collapsed, groaning, bleeding. Billy picked up a stool and started to hurl it down onto Charles’ head; he stopped the momentum with a hand on one of the legs, wrenched it out of his grip, and beat him back down with it until his body sagged against the counter, then the floor.

“Hey, assholes—” The bartender shifted partway over the counter to intervene; he’d twisted his hand in Pickles’ collar first, inexplicably, at which point Charles’ hand shot out sideways, open palm strike flat in the center of his chest. He sailed back against the wall of shelves, which came teetering down in angles. Bottle after bottle slid down and crashed to the floor, glass shards slumped on the wood next to the body.

It was very quick, and afterwards it was very quiet.

Toki was the first to pull in a shrill breath. “Charles,” he wheezed, “you puts the blood everywhere and now the moonshine mans is _dead_ and—”

Charles adjusted his tie and shook his hand out. “He’s not dead, Toki.”

“He should be, though,” Nathan said gravely. “But this is an acceptable level of brutality. I would’ve gone for the murder myself, but this. Again. Acceptable.”

“Is it.” Dismissive. Maybe a little pleased. He shook out his hand a final time, then loosed his pocket square from the front of his suit jacket to dab at his hand delicately. Toki peered over his shoulder to get a glimpse of the blood smear on his skin. “It’s also not the best use of my time. So, if that will be all …” 

Which, fucking, of course it was. They were standing in an empty saloon next to three unconscious bodies. There was nothing left to knock out except the band themselves, and Pickles was pretty sure Charles could no more breach his no-harm clause than he could countenance the conflation of “you’re” and “your” in a text message: he just didn’t have it in him. Even if he probably dreamed about it.

“In that case,” he said to no one in particular, folding his bloodstained kerchief back into square shape with deft hands, “studio’s booked at, ah, seven in the morning tomorrow.”

He looked sideways at Pickles, who had been silent for an uncannily long time. His usual mild expression seemed to lose some of its sharpness, instead gaining a soft downturn at both corners of his mouth. He reached out after a moment, and Pickles watched, as if from a distance, the way his hand reached out to momentarily brush up against his upper arm. 

“I would advise you all to get on the bus soon. Thank you.”

And with that he turned and left. A scant twenty seconds later Klokateers began to file in to dispense with waivers and to write checks for the busted furniture and bloodstains. 

Pickles let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been keeping in as the saloon door swung shut and the square-shouldered silhouette disappeared.

He nearly jumped as Murderface huffed noisily through the gap in his teeth. “Wow! What a cocky asshole,” he said, and they all turned to look at him. “I bet I could take ‘im.”

Skwisgaar said, “The last times you gots in a fights you gots your dicks broke.”

“That wasn’t a fight! That was goddamn assault an’ battery!”

“Yeah, sure, OK.”

Nathan was already reaching past the counter for another bottle even though his breath was as flammable as the hovel must have been all those years back, but Pickles couldn’t remember that. He only remembered the important things on such nights, such as the delirious drunkenness in his veins and capillaries, the lazy heat that undulated slowly in his body for days on end. He knew he’d remember this, too: the ugly tangle of emotion that had crested in his gut at the implications Billy made about him and his stupid garage, as noxious as any intoxication.

And Charles coming in, saying _fuck all of that shit_ , in his own Charles way—with his sharp words and his deft hands and brutality. Yeah, he thought, even as he mimicked Nathan in climbing behind the counter for more bottles: he was going to remember that, too.

  
-  


  


It was that memory that eventually brought him back to Charles’ office two days later, when they’d managed to successfully pilfer the rest of the alcohol and give it a special place in the Dethbus, and when they returned to Mordhaus after a recording session in Austin that had pulled a sandworm army from the foundations of the earth. The American southwest was in chaos. They had to reschedule.

He knocked on the door. “Come in,” Charles’ voice called from inside; when he entered Charles was seated at his desk with his innumerable papers, capping an inkwell bottle and steepling his hands for Pickles’ arrival. “Hello.”

“Hey.” Pickles scrubbed the back of his neck with his palm. He’d readied himself for this moment, pulled in a long draught of that moonshine, and he still didn’t know what to say. “Never did, uh, thank you for all that stuff back there. With the punching and the stabbing.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Pickles,” Charles said. His tone was, again, dismissive. “When I first became your manager, I realized it would be in my best interests to review all closed and outstanding cases you had in state and county courts …. ah, see what could be done to clean house.” Charles shrugged. “Which I do, often. But the felony arson at Billy’s was attributed to Mr. Bullets well before I became your legal counsel.”

“But you know I didn’t do it, right.” 

“I wasn’t there, Pickles. I don’t know who did or didn’t do it, and Mr. Bullets never did formally come forth with an admission of guilt.”

“No, I—honestly, I don’t know who the fuck did all that at Billy’s, or whatever. I don’t care. But that guy said—” He folded his arms. He felt his nails dig into the skin of his upper arm. “About that shit with my family. How long has that stuff been out there for random dicks to just … _bring up_ whenever they …” 

He trailed off. Charles paused, then said, “It was mentioned briefly in a Snakes ‘N’ Barrels-centric episode of _Behind the Music_. I’ve suppressed the episode since I became your manager, deleted every existing copy, in fact, but I can’t account for reruns that may have occurred before then. I’m sorry.”

Pickles scoffed and collapsed in the seat across from him at last. The seats in this office were plush, comfortable, and just a touch lower than Charles’ own seat behind his desk. “Fuckin’ figures! Of course everyone and their fuckin’ dad has seen it by now, honestly, it’s a goddamn miracle that people don’t just throw it at my face all the fuckin’ time—Jesus, Charlie, how long until someone was gonna tell me?”

Charles didn’t answer him. Didn’t have an answer, probably. So he looked sideways, at the fake potted plant that Charles kept since he couldn’t be bothered to water a real one. 

The office was always dry, too. Bad habitat for a potted plant. That would explain why Pickles’ throat was dry, why his fingers and joints all felt stiff, why he’d felt weirdly fucked up since the saloon—it was all just coming to a head here, in this dry-ass office. It was just science.

He was speaking before he could stop himself, and his voice sounded like someone else’s, like some loser. “You know it wasn’t me, right?” he said. “Not the … Billy’s stuff. My stuff. You—” He made a disgusted noise in his throat, half teeth. “I didn’t do it.”

Charles looked at him for a long moment, and then—his expression softened suddenly, as if he’d found something that he knew he wasn’t intended to see and had every intention of handling it with delicate care. Which—shouldn’t have felt like anything, should’ve felt intrusive, Charles was always so fucking intrusive—but instead relief and anxiety seemed to beat wildly together inside of his chest, helplessly conjoined, polyrhythmic. 

“I know,” he said gently. 

“No, I—shit.” Pickles pushed away from the table and scrubbed a hand over the parts in his hair. This was stupid. They’d spent too much time on it already. “You don’t need to patronize me, dude—”

“I’m not patronizing you. I know.” He reached beneath his desk and pulled out a folder, sliding it across the dark wood of the desk. “It’s in his interview transcript from when he applied to work with Dethklok Australia. He confessed essentially unprompted.” 

The front of the folder was just another one of the million innocuous manila folders that Charles kept handy, whose indices seemed to only make sense to him. The “P” on the tab must have stood for personnel, at least. Or maybe Pickles and Pickles-related paraphernalia. He eyed it with suspicion, then eyed Charles with suspicion, then picked it up to skim over the script. 

It met his eyes more suddenly than he thought it would, in stark black serif—an admission that Seth had never again copped to in person, words that dragged Pickles without regard for his safety to that day—the thick ash clouds, the smell of burnt wood and crushed plaster, Seth’s snide mutters in his ear about how he was so _fucked_ when Mom and Dad got home, and by _he_ he meant _we_ and by _we_ he meant _you_ —

Pickles snapped the folder shut with considerable effort. His fingers were trembling, and with it the corner of the folder bobbed in his field of view, until it suddenly stopped. It took him a second to realize that Charles had reached across the desk to cover Pickles’ hand with his own.

“Hey.” That was Charles’ voice, even and lackadaisically sweet. “Stay with me.”

The touch of his palm was dry, and the face of his watch glinted red, reminiscent of the blink of a cellphone tower.

“That’s all in the past now.”

“I … don’t think that’s how that works, dude,” Pickles said weakly.

His hand didn’t withdraw. His other hand reached out, however, to take the folder and put it tidily away; once that was done he took Pickles’ other hand. “I know. But it can be helpful to pretend it is.”

They were quiet for a few minutes. It occurred to Pickles in the din of his thoughts that it was really fucking gay, to be sitting and holding Charles’ hands from across his massive desk, but for some reason he couldn’t take them away. 

“It’s good,” Pickles heard himself say, as if from afar. “It’s good to see that, you know, on paper. I mean, I didn’t need it, that shithead is never gonna own up to any of the shithead shit he pulls. Not when it counts. And my parents, fuckin’ unbelievable, you know? Cradle to grave with this shit. But.”

“No, no. I believe I understand. The truth making itself known somehow, in some capacity … It’s the little things.”

The little things, sure. How Charles had sent Seth six continents away. The slick sound the glass had made between Billy’s ribs. A folder previously tucked away in obscurity, now in a file cabinet by Charles’ elbow just in case he needed to assuage Pickles’ nerves. The square and even cut of his nails, the spread of his long fingers over Pickles’ hands. 

Eventually those fingers curved beneath Pickles’ palms. “I have a meeting in ten minutes,” Charles murmured. 

Which could’ve been a lie, but it didn’t feel like he’d overstayed his welcome, either. He sighed. “Yeah. I need a fuckin’ drink.”

“Mmm. Go easy on that moonshine.” He rose from the desk, and before Pickles knew it their hands were disconnected, unattached, as if they’d never touched at all. “I’ll see you out, then.”

He trailed Pickles on the way to the door. Pickles stopped in the entryway, because there was something he almost missed, something he suddenly realized he could have just for the asking. That was the thing, he’d started to realize, with Offdensen. You needed something, and one way or another, it’d just appear in front of you. As if it had always been there. He didn’t even wait for you to ask.

“Hey, chief. Can I—”

The words died in his throat when Charles arched an eyebrow at him, which was probably intended to be prohibitive, but—fuck it, Pickles thought. If they waited to get permission from the guy for every impulse they had, they wouldn’t be able to take a shit in the morning.

He leaned in. At a close distance Charles’ breath seemed to be clean, nondescript. Like an animal that couldn’t be scented in dead air.

“Pickles,” Charles said softly. 

Indignation flared suddenly in his chest; he didn’t know how to get a handle on it. He revved up to mouth off, because _fuck_ this robot bullshit, seriously, and fuck rejection too—and then he realized again the suddenness with which Charles touched him. He’d taken Pickles’ hands again before he had time to notice or flinch, this time to guide him away and then steady him tenderly. Charles’ expression as he did so was utterly level, even-keeled. A warning cloaked in nice blazer, like the poison snakes that happened to have muted colors. 

Pickles drew back. They’d had a moment. It was a good one, too, tender in a way that clutched at him and clawed him raw over the course of a few minutes. If he concentrated he could taste what he’d missed, too, just barely: in the space between them he could finally smell Charles’ bland toothpaste, the smooth cognac he’d had in the middle of the day. And fuck, if that didn’t sound good right now, especially since he hadn’t brushed his teeth in two days and hadn’t had a drink in three hours. The perfect storm. 

But in the end, it was just like what Charles said earlier. Little things.

“Right,” he said awkwardly. “Night, chief.”

Charles let go of his hands again. The second time in the past hour. “It’s three in the afternoon,” he said.

“I said _good night, asshole_ ,” Pickles said, and left; behind him he could hear the office door click shut before he turned the corner.


End file.
